PARTIAL-BIRTH abortion — banned by the House yesterday and to be considered by the Supreme Court later this month — is not an abstraction to Brenda Shafer.

In 1993, Shafer assisted Dr. Martin Haskell in aborting a 6-month-old Down syndrome fetus. She watched as Haskell delivered the baby feet-first, leaving only his head inside the birth canal.

“The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his feet were kicking,” she told Congress in 1995. “Then the doctor stuck the scissors through the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out in a flinch, a startle reaction, like a baby does when he thinks he might fall.

“The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening and sucked the baby’s brains out.”

This is what we mean when we talk about “choice.”

This is what even abortion-rights Democrats like Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan and House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt cannot stomach. This is what 60 percent of Americans, including many pro-choicers, want outlawed.

This is what Bill Clinton defends. And Al Gore. And Hillary Rodham Clinton. And, it’s painful to admit, Rudy Giuliani.

Novelist and screenwriter John Irving can carry on all he wants from the Academy Awards stage about the “courage” of Miramax in making the pro-abortion film “The Cider House Rules.” So brave was the studio that it refused to mention abortion in any of its ads for the picture.

But it is not courageous to advocate keeping this kind of obscene violence toward the weakest members of the human community legal. It is sickening cowardice.

You want to see real courage? Check out “Letters to Gabriel,” a slim volume written by Karen Garver Santorum. In 1996, as her U.S. senator husband was leading the first congressional efforts to ban the partial-birth procedure, Karen Santorum discovered that her unborn son was suffering from a severe birth defect.

Mrs. Santorum had been writing letters to her child from the day she and husband Rick discovered she was expecting. The first letter, dated June 25, wonders, “What kind of child will you be? What gifts will you bring? On this day, we can only guess and hope.”

But on Oct. 4, the doctor told the Santorums their child had a fatal urinary-tract defect, and would die before natural birth, or shortly thereafter. Another doctor suggested they terminate the pregnancy. The Santorums, devout Catholics, wouldn’t hear of it.

They named the boy Gabriel Michael, and prayed for a miracle. Gabriel was born on Oct. 11, and died two hours later in his father’s arms.

In the days and weeks following Gabriel’s passing, the Santorums thought hard about partial-birth abortion, which was then being debated in the Senate. One senator said women who opt for the procedure do so because they have no choice.

“There is another way,” wrote Mrs. Santorum. “We know, because we chose it.”

“In two hours, we experienced life as deeply, as intensely as we might have in an entire lifetime. The emotions that make up a life — love, sorrow, regret, joy — were packed into the brief span of time that was your own life. The life of Gabriel Michael Santorum.

“To have rejected that experience, to have tried to cut ourselves off from that through the partial-birth procedure, would have been to reject your life and the beauty of all life.”

Mrs. Santorum wrote that loving their lost son for even two hours, and knowing that he entered and left the world swaddled by that love, was fulfilling beyond all measure.

“You joined our family forever,” the mother wrote. “You have not been obliterated. You were known and will always be remembered. Your memory lives within us always.”

Who do you suppose sleeps better at night: the Santorums, who honored their son’s life, and life itself, by bearing the physical and emotional pain of their son’s birth and death — or those extremists like Dr. Haskell and Bill Clinton, who insist that an act of homicidal malice against helpless babies is a morally acceptable solution to unwanted or difficult pregnancies?